■ Veterans of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign founded the startup that made the glitchy app for the Iowa caucuses.

WASHINGTON — The little-known technology startup under scrutiny after the meltdown of the Iowa Democratic caucuses Monday night was founded little more than a year ago by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign who had presented themselves as gurus of campaigning in the digital era.

Shadow Inc. was picked in secret by the Iowa Democratic Party after its leaders consulted with the Democratic National Committee on vetting vendors and security protocols for developing a phone app used to gather and tabulate the caucus results.

Party officials in Iowa blamed an unspecified “coding issue” with the software that led to it producing only partial and unreliable results. It did not identify the firm that produced the technology, but campaign disclosure reports show that the Iowa party paid $63,000 to Shadow in late 2019.

After the company came under withering criticism on social media Tuesday, it issued a series of tweets that expressed “regret” over technical glitches that contributed to a delay in the release of results, but stopped short of apologizing.

“We sincerely regret the delay in the reporting of the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses and the uncertainty it has caused to the candidates, their campaigns, and Democratic caucus-goers,” the company posted Tuesday on Twitter. “We will apply the lessons learned in the future, and have already corrected the underlying technology issue.”

Shadow Inc. was launched by ACRONYM, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan, a political strategist who runs companies aimed at promoting Democratic candidates and priorities. McGowan, 34, is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, which records show has also paid Shadow Inc. $42,500 for software.

McGowan sought to distance herself from Shadow’s IowaReporterApp on Monday night, characterizing the app developer as an independent company.

In a separate statement, an ACRONYM spokesman said the nonprofit organization is an investor in several companies, including Shadow, but was “eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party with respect to what happened.”

But business and tax records show ACRONYM and Shadow are registered at the same Washington, D.C., street address, which belongs to a WeWork coworking location. Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira previously served as the chief operating officer and chief technology officer at ACRONYM, according to an online resume.

On Sunday, McGowan tweeted photos from a birthday celebration that included her husband and Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party.

David Plouffe, who helped lead both of former President Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, joined ACRONYM’s board of directors in September.

Just who works at Shadow was not clear on the company’s webpage Tuesday. But resumes posted on the online business networking site LinkedIn show the company’s top executives all worked in the Clinton campaign’s digital operation in 2016.

Niemira, the CEO, was Clinton’s director of product, responsible for creating a digital platform for field organizers to contact voters and manage local volunteers “while opening up new avenues of data collection for the campaign.”